I can’t even do a normal share of an image. It just tried to send a “proxy_image” file instead, which of course isn’t anything that people can actually see if you send it anyway.

Man, I still really struggle to understand​ how we can reliably age-gate anything on the Internet without sacrificing privacy for everyone.

IRL you can just show your govt issued ID, but there’s virtually zero privacy risk doing so. Bouncers don’t register ID scans, typically, and they’re just one person. The govt doesn’t know you went to that club or drank at that one bar, unless they’re actively surveilling you.

But if I needed to identify myself as an adult online, simply by virtue of how digital systems work, that probably requires checking against a govt database, and that database will keep logs, and now Trump knows I went to Pornhub, and likely also exactly what I watched or searched for.

Maybe I’m dumb, but I really don’t know any way around this sort of thing.

I remember reading a Haidt article for an ethics class in grad school. The analysis felt… underwhelming? It’s been too long to remember the article, but I think it was something about the “morality” of conservatives being not worse but different than liberals (limited to the US, iirc). I just remember reading it and going… yeah conservative morality functions differently. It’s also just demonstrably worse, though, even based on what the article was focusing on?

That class was weird though. Mostly just a bunch of folks going,“yeah well this is what I care about” and disagreeing with each other with seemingly no intention whatsoever to try and evaluate or engage with one another.

Was that from Bluesky or somewhere else?

Existing owners can upgrade to the Switch 2 version for $10, gaining better framerates, higher resolutions, and HDR support.

I didn’t realize they had this option. As far as legal routes go, that’s not terrible (assuming there’s no weird downside, like no longer being able to play the original on the switch 1). Free would be better, of course, but $10 certainly beats paying $90 just to play the improved version on switch 2.

High skill ceiling?

More like a high skill floor! Good Lord, I don’t think I’d ever be able to beat that level without cheats, lol.

No worries! The only reason to evaluate (or re-evaluate) a piece of software is if you have a need or desire the software might fulfill. And if you don’t have either, it literally doesn’t matter, lol.

I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it’s original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!

I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums… but it’s so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.

In that regard, fuck Discord.

Does India particularly differ? I think nods still mean yes and shakes still mean no there. They just also have the “noncommittal head bobble” that tends to confuse people outside India (and, presumably, Pakistan).

I sympathize with Gen Z. It’s pretty natural to see your parents’ generation having done way better than you are doing at the same age and feel like you’ve had something stolen from you. It’s a pretty profound sense of loss, esp. when you do look at history and think, “Jesus Christ, do we have to suffer like the Great Depression to turn this shit around?”

So I don’t know if the WPA itself would be considered socialism. I imagine it depends on your working definition of socialism.

What I can say with a little more confidence is that the WPA and a bunch of other New Deal programs were a direct result of pressure from American Socialists and Communists at the time.

I can’t recall if this is apocryphal or not, but the story goes that FDR told a private gathering of America’s biggest capitalists about his plans for the New Deal and told them they were going to pay for it through taxes. When they protested for a compromise, FDR said “this is the compromise. The alternative is guillotines.” But I can’t find that quote anywhere, so I may have made it up.

I’ll have to check those out! Thanks for the rec.

I haven’t used Ground News past the free trial, but a decent feature that I liked was simply that you could look into “a story” and get virtually all of the possible news reports about that one story. Just handy, tbh. If there are other free aggregators doing that sort of linking and grouping, I’d be interested.

The thing about “sources” I can understand, but I think they still have their place. For example, I really like Ars Technica as a tech and science source. One of the things that sold me on them was seeing them make predictions based on their “sources” and those predictions coming true (or close enough). When it comes to politics, the same thing applies. Have they established enough credibility to warrant me believing their “sources”, at least provisionally?

But if you don’t need or want to be on the cutting edge of political conspiring, then waiting for the court filing, full bill, etc. makes complete sense. I just often might need news, anyway, to understand the broader context of a primary source.

To be fair, that does limit your ability to decide what is newsworthy to begin with. Ain’t nobody got the time to read every primary source ever, and sometimes the news is literally just “sources say” until an actual court case or whatever drops.

Granted, if you already know what you want to stay updated on, then cutting out the middleman could be workable. You’re just kinda limited in terms of what you’ll ultimately be exposed to.

I just don’t think the average American can (let alone would) read enough primary sources to keep “up to date” in the political sphere. Add science and tech, and that’s just way too much to wade through. Even seasoned beat reporters miss stuff on their beat.

I’d like to add some nuance to your observation.

We Americans, most of us anyway, went to public school. And in our history classes, we teach what has been called the “Standard American History Myth” by YouTube channel Knowing Better in their video on American Neo-slavery.

In short, America is founded on many ideals (freedom, liberty, etc), and we generally write our histories as if we have always believed in and acted according to those beliefs (with slavery being a “failure to live up to those ideals”). That’s the simple history we teach our kids here, it’s what we grow up believing, and the only people who ever really learn anything different had nontraditional learning opportunities (e.g. local experts in black history, American Indian history, etc), studied history at a university, or nowadays maybe learned from social media (like the above Knowing Better channel).

Manifest Destiny is a big example. We teach that America believed in their divinely inspired right to the American continent, from sea to shining sea. We do mention the Trail of Tears, but it’s taught as a brute fact at best, and as punishment for standing against America at worst. There’s no emotional processing that we did a bad thing and that we shouldn’t do that thing anymore. Most Americans would do it all again given the opportunity.

And that’s the big thing. We just… simply don’t have any sort of national level conscience. If we did something bad to someone, no we didn’t, and if we did, they deserved it.

I only really came to grips with America’s dark side in grad school by reading, listening, and watching interviews with black people who protested Jim Crowe and Asian Americans who told their experiences living in concentration camps (euphemistically “internment camps”) during WW2.

That, I think, is the biggest problem in the American psyche. Not only have we “never done anything wrong, really” but we’re also pumped up on religious symbolism (we’re a beacon on a hill, a light into the world, etc).

“Divinely inspired” crybully, basically. There’s a reason Trump resonates so strongly here. He’s the embodiment of “I am the best, I never did anything wrong, and fuck you for trying to insinuate otherwise, you ungrateful traitor.”

Two things started the slow 10ish year journey to atheism for me. I can’t remember which happened first.

Some Mormon lads doing their mandatory missionary work knocked on our door when I was home alone. I decided, screw it, kill them with kindness. Maybe I’ll convert them! After I got them some ice water, they started the spiel. It was so stupid, how could anyone believe this? Then I thought, wait, how is what I believe any more believable? That was an unsettling thought that I could never really shake.

I also challenged myself to read the entire Bible (NIV) front to back (which I did, thankyouverymuch). I already had a lot of apologetics for the pentateuch warfare, slavery, etc. but in Psalms there’s a verse that basically goes, “blessed is he who dashes the babies on the rocks.” And like. What the fuck is that. In what possible circumstances is killing babies okay, let alone with God’s explicit endorsement? That also stuck in my head ever since.

There was a lot else in between, but years later I stumbled into a copy of The God Delusion. “Know thine enemy, right?” So I read it on lunch breaks at work. While I now know the book has a reputation for kinda bad philosophy, by the end it had tidily dismantled the last vestiges of the purely “rational” arguments to believe in God I still had. So I sat there, an atheist for the first time in my life.

It does, but not everyone sets up their 2fa, or uses the least secure forms. Then passwords get hacked, and those lists get shared so when the next hack comes along, they have that many more tools to try and break the encryption (assuming there is any) on a bigger site, compromising even more people.

It’s a whole systemic shit bag. Passkeys were meant to solve a lot of these problems, and they would, but Big Tech is botching the execution in favor of yet another thing locking you into their ecosystem.

Jesus Christ, dude, that is exactly it.

We’re trying to implement passkeys at work and the testing has been an absolute nightmare. Literally have no control over the onboarding experience because each tech giant is clamoring over each other, interjecting into the process to be the “home” for your passkeys. It’s bananas.

When it’s all set up, it’s kinda great! But getting set up in the first place is an exercise in frustration.

I like this idea, but I don’t know how you build a site to facilitate that without also being super appealing to children and pedos at the same time.

Do you think “frank” means “without nuance or care for how what I’m saying could be misconstrued as bigotry”?

Like, literally the only change I know I’d like to see is “there are some women who” and like… that’s hardly an imposition, y’know? Definitely not a “40 page essay” either.